July 6, 2011

Twitter, once a site without much of a business plan, is now a social media staple with a growing number of revenue streams.

Twitter introduced promoted tweets and trends last year, which proved to be the company’s first notable revenue source.

Recently, eMarketer predicted that Twitter would triple its advertising revenue to $150 million in 2011.

Twitter plans to introduce promoted tweets into users’ timelines by the fall.

In October, Twitter that it would develop a self-serve tool that would also allow small businesses to get in on the Twitter advertising game.

The upcoming platform will function a bit like Google AdWords for Twitter. If the WSJ‘s report is accurate (the paper sites an unnamed “person familiar with the matter”), it looks like investors consider the platform to have more in common with Google’s product — earning potential.